


Three Birds

by ExpatGirl



Series: Episode Codas: Hieroglyphs [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Blood, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Post-Episode: s11e10 The Devil in the Details, Sigils, The Darkness - Freeform, spells
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-21
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-22 07:26:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,975
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6070432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExpatGirl/pseuds/ExpatGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Lucifer had texted over a day ago, demanding to meet, then and there. He had the final Seal, he said. Dean had decided it was better to not ask what it was or how he’d gotten it. Dean had stalled, citing the slower travelling times of human modes of transport, but he’d highballed it. By a lot. Every hour counted, every minute they could claw out for their plan was precious. And what did the devil know about traffic in Peoria, anyway? Still, in another hour and—Dean checked his watch—twenty-two minutes, it would be go-time.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Birds

**Author's Note:**

> I've always wanted to write something set in an [abandoned truck stop](https://www.google.com/search?q=abandoned+truck+stops&sa=X&bih=711&biw=1280&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&ved=0ahUKEwiCwMCymIzLAhWovIMKHTkSCjEQsAQIHA). Is there anything more quintessentially _Supernatural_?

**Black Ibis**

Dean was no stranger to dubious acts done in late night truck stops and rundown gas stations. They were almost-spaces where almost-people like him slipped in and out of the respectable world, the healthy upright-and-talking world. Everyone was on their way to somewhere else, including him. ( _Just passing through, man? What’re you after?_ ) This was the land of telephone booths that rang all night and shower rooms that cost seven dollars but might earn you fifty, dull striplights and bright pills: questionable spaces for questionable deeds, where the wall between the real world and the world that really was cracked.

Sometimes the edges were sharp. More than once Dean felt his fate snag on such an edge while walking through some crumbling nowhere place, with blood or gravedirt or whatever in his mouth or on his hands. Once in awhile he pulled free, but usually he stayed snagged. Sometimes, he didn’t mind. Occasionally, he was even glad. ( _Buddy, next time lower the volume.)_

So it was really no surprise that he sat on the hood of the Impala about fifteen miles outside Pontiac, Illinois, in a colorless forecourt that advertised gas prices a decade out of date, and felt something _catch_. Lucifer had texted over a day ago, demanding to meet, then and there. He had the final Seal, he said. Dean had decided it was better to not ask what it was or how he’d gotten it. Dean had stalled, citing the slower travelling times of human modes of transport, but he’d highballed it. By a lot. Every hour counted, every minute they could claw out for their plan was precious. And what did the devil know about traffic in Peoria, anyway? Still, in another hour and—Dean checked his watch—twenty-two minutes, it would be go-time. Which meant he had one hour and twenty-one minutes to will his pulse into a normal time signature and get his game face on.

Sam was sprawled on the back seat, in the deep grey sleep of dreamroot. Fourteen minutes until he would jolt upright with a gasp. Dean knew how it went. Sam was going to be dehydrated as fuck when he woke up, so Dean had left a six pack of bottled water in the foot well. They’d put angel warding on every available inch of the car interior. Holy fire probably wasn’t on the table—Lucifer would be expecting it. Still, it was on hand, along with a garrison’s worth of angel blades. Dean didn’t want to use any of them. The object of the quest was to save one angel and kill another, but all they had were angel-killing tools, which didn’t help so much with the first half. In fact, when it came to angels, all there seemed to be in the world were killing tools. How did you even _begin_ saving an angel? Not just not-killing him, not just keeping him alive, but actually _saving_ him? The realization was beginning to creep into his mind that he’d mistaken the two things for a long time. Both for himself, and for Cas. And that’s what got them in this mess in the first place, wasn’t it? But they could fix it. They could. Somehow.

Hopefully, they could find some method that worked here on earth. Something. Anything. Otherwise Dean didn’t know how…

He shook his head. _Nope_. That was a problem for another day. Tomorrow, with any luck.

It all depended on Rowena, and her ability to perform whatever variation of that spell Cas had directed them to. Dean didn’t trust her as far as he could throw her, but he had to hope her desire for revenge outweighed her natural deviousness.

Dean laughed bitterly to himself. “Hope is such bullshit,” he said, to the predawn crickets. But that’s what they had to work with, and Dean could make a weapon from anything with enough motivation. As long as things didn’t go sideways too bad, in a few hours they’d have Amara blown to smithereens, Lucifer a scorch mark on the pavement, and Cas in the back seat, on their way to whatever burger joint he wanted, anywhere in the continental United States. As long as things didn’t go sideways.

In the car, there was a stutter of movement. Sam was waking up. Dean slid from the hood and watched the sun come up.

**Flamingo**

Things went sideways almost immediately.

The blade had pierced Sam’s liver, and the blood running from between his ash-white fingers was more black than red. Rowena was the only reason he was still alive, flitting in and out of his body as the holy fire bellowed all around (they’d needed it after all, if only to keep the fight contained). Amara was trapped, not by the fire but the runes and sigils—drawn in the blood of a dozen different beings—and the angry splintered jut of Raphael’s staff, plunged deep where her heart, if she had one, would be.

It was hard to say if she or Lucifer was angrier. They’d lost the element of surprise; Sam wasn’t entirely sure how. None the less, they’d lost it. Now Rowena was a picador to Lucifer’s bull, goading him further and further into the central maze of sigils and towards Amara, where she and Dean squared off, unable to kill each other but refusing to quit trying. Behind Sam, an ancient gas pump exploded and flew two storeys into the air. His ears rang from the blast. He felt the sharp buzz of Rowena’s ghost stepping into him, stemming the flow of blood temporarily.

 _Don’t die yet, Sam_ , her voice hissed in his head. _You need to be alive when I finish this spell or it won’t work. Your fingerprints are all over it. It’s only going to recognize you._

“Right,” Sam gasped, forcing his eyes to focus. He was having trouble hearing and seeing, all the sound and color in the world slowly bleeding away. She pushed him forward, towards the back of the complex. “Could you maybe fix the hole in my vital organs?”

 _Do you think this is a tea party,_ _little_ _boy? Do you think we have time for that? Just stay alive for the next twenty minutes_.

“Will do,” Sam said, leaning against the side of the main building, which was now little more than a burnt-out shell. A cartoonish blonde pinup was still visible on the side of the wall. Once she’d proclaimed this place the **Hello! Diner,** **where** **the Drinks are Cold and the Food is Hot! Welcome!**

Now her pockmarked smile and charred eye turned on him to say that **Hell...is...come!**

_Well, lady, you’re not wrong._

He stepped forward and there was...an angel in a trench coat. Grace spouted blue white through the cuts in its skin. Sam had no idea whose grace it was, but the look of celestial wrath in those eyes was one Sam knew well, and never wanted to see again.

_Run, Sam._

Sam ran. Rowena streamed out of him flickering towards Lucifer and away, away. There was a roar—wind or fire or archangel, Sam was no longer able to tell and then....

And then there was Lucifer, looming over him. Sam threw his hands up defensively, and the loss of pressure on his side caused his wound to bleed anew. This was it, Lucifer was leaning down over him, palm outstretched. It would be a close call between smiting and bleeding out, and it was all for nothing. All the good and all the bad (had there been enough of the former to make up for the latter?), and all of it for _nothing_.

Sam shrank back as the hand made contact, flinching on instinct. “Sam,” said a grave voice that was not Lucifer’s. The grace that poured into him was the blue bite of mountain air, a plunge into a cold stream, a storm. Familiar and clean. Sam’s flesh was suddenly, unaccountably, whole. He opened his eyes and looked up, bewildered. “Sam, it’s me.”

“Cas?”

“Hi, Sam.”

“Cas, how…” He attempted to scramble up, but was still too unsteady to manage it in any coordinated way.

“You were dying.” Cas crouched down and pulled him to his feet. “It’s alright, Sam. I’ll hold him off. I’ll hold him off until it’s done.” His body shuddered, as if to prove his point, and for a moment his eyes dimmed, before flashing ultraviolet. Cas looked at him again, and Sam recognized the set of his shoulders and jaw. He hadn’t let go of Sam's hand, and he squeezed it, firm and affectionate. And final. “Take care of yourself, my friend.”

He turned and strode towards the back of the building, where the sounds of Dean’s struggle could dimly be heard, as though through a crack in a belljar. It took Sam the space of a heartbeat to realize that this was Cas saying goodbye. Someone he loved, a friend, a brother, saying goodbye to him.

“Cas, wait!”

The world was still spinning more than it should be, but Sam hauled himself around the back of the main building, to where it opened up to the cracked concrete sea where crosscountry rigs used to stop for the night. There was Dean, and over him Amara, attempting to pull the staff from her body. “It doesn’t have to be like this, Dean,” Sam heard her say. Everything seemed muffled, the roar and crackle of the fire, the crash of tumbling masonry, the howling wind, all of it seemed distant and unreal, as though she were sucking up all the sound. And the light. The air seemed to be ripping itself apart above her, shivering from light to dark like the nerves of a dying man. “Don’t you see? My way is peace. And you are a part of it. The most important part!”

“Your way is _nothing_ ,” Dean said, pushing himself up on his elbows.

“Yes! No pain, no suffering, no sadness.”

“No freedom, no hope, no love.”

She laughed, her eyes seemed to glitter with...was that delight? “What have any of those things _ever_ done for you but bring you despair?” She straightened up and looked at Dean tenderly. “Dean, those things aren’t gifts, they’re _curses_. And together you and I can free the world from them! Not just the earth. Heaven, Hell, all of it! There are other realms out there, too. I can feel them. I’ll get to them all, and you’ll help me.”

“No.”

“Don’t you want to save people, Dean? Isn’t that what you do?”

Cas had nearly reached them by then, with Sam only a few paces behind. “Amara!” Castiel’s voice rang out like a bell, the only sound in all the world that carried.

Her head snapped up and her gaze fixed on him like a shark’s. “Hello, blue eyes.” She moved away from Dean.

“We have unfinished business.”

Dean seemed to come out of one trance and into another. “Cas?” Sam slid to his knees next to him, hissing for him to get up and move, but Dean seemed transfixed.

Cas let his eyes flicker for a fraction of a moment to Dean. “Dean.” There was an entire language in that one word. He took a slow step towards Amara.

Dean made a sort of strangled sound that alarmed Sam, but suddenly he was trying to find his feet, and it was all Sam could do to get them both vertical.

“This doesn’t concern you, little bird.”

“I think you’ll find it does,” Cas said. His face contorted for a moment, baring his teeth like a feral animal. He let out a raw cry before straightening back up. Sam recognized it now, Lucifer clawing at Cas, trying to grapple his way back into control. But Cas’ voice was his own when he said: “I made myself a promise when I took up my weapon. I decided I should probably keep it.” He took another step.

“Weapon?” Amara asked, frowning. “You mean that little blade of yours?” She smiled, all teeth. “Oh, that’s so cute.”

“No.” Cas tilted his chin down, a lioness about to spring. Sam felt the hairs on his arms stand up. “You’ll know it when you feel it.”

She let out a laugh, but it died abortively as Cas grabbed the end of the staff and pulled her the last few paces towards him.

“Cas!” Dean said, and his voice nearly shattered.

“I’m sorry, Dean.” Cas pulled Amara to him, pushing the end of the staff through his own body, bringing the two of them together. He grabbed the back of her neck and…

Kissed her. He _kissed_ her? What the fuck? What the…

But then Sam saw it, the fount of holy light, from Cas into Amara, out of his throat and into hers, power and breath and movement into stasis and darkness.

Sam yelled for Rowena the same moment that Dean yelled for Cas, and the world seemed to dilate, then contract like a pupil, like a collapsing galaxy.

Then everything went black.

 **Cormorant**

Dean wasn’t anywhere. Again. The bombed-out truck stop was gone, and in its place, a meadow that he distantly remembered from another life. But it only had the appearance of somewhere. He knew, without knowing how he knew, that it wasn’t really there, that the flowers didn’t exist and had never existed, that the light was coming from nowhere.

And there was Amara. Her black dress fluttered in the nonexistent breeze. But she was listing oddly, leaning up against a tree, and her skin had a clammy pallor, cold fever sweat. She wasn’t looking at him.

Dean pushed himself to his knees, and then to his feet. He was unarmed, but it didn’t matter. He knew that, even if he had a knife or a gun, it would be pointless. They were—he wretched a little—bound to each other. He couldn't kill her, and shame burned in his throat.

Dean staggered, made coltish and drunk by...dying? Being ripped from his body? Shoved into another dimension? Whatever it was, it was fucking with his inner ear. When he looked up again, he saw a shape in the grass, the size of a man, a mass of tan and dark behind Amara that drew his focus to it like a laser. He still felt that inertia, the deer-in-the-headlights feeling he got every time he was in her presence, but this was stronger, this spurred him forward, past her, like she wasn’t even there.

“Cas?”

There was a deep intake of breath, and Cas opened his eyes. Except: “Guess again.”

“Lucifer.” Dean stepped backwards sharply, heedless of Amara behind him.

“In the flesh.” He shook his head. “Small, but wasn’t he fierce.” Lucifer stood, spitting blood. Some of it ran down his chin, tinting the white of his collar. “I have to say, I didn’t see that coming. I wonder when he thought of it.”

“Where is he?”

Lucifer gestured with his head. “Ask your girlfriend.”

Dean whipped around in time to see Amara drop to her knees, clutching her hair.

“No.” He looked back at Lucifer. There was a frantic feeling worming its way up from his stomach. “You’re wrong.”

Lucifer looked at him, hawk-like. “Am I?”

Dean felt as though he were choking on his own tongue. He swayed a little, fought down the urge to be sick. How could he feel sick when he was pretty sure he didn’t even have a body?

“I’m sorry I couldn’t keep my promise to him, but it’s better this way, don’t you think? A soldier’s death for a soldier.” Lucifer winced. “Too bad he dragged some of me in there with him. But I don’t begrudge him that. I’d say I was due a little payback.” He tightened his tie, and wiped the drying trail of blood from his lip. Behind them, Amara started to crawl. “Strange little creature, on whom so much depended. Who could have guessed?” He seemed to break from his reverie. “Younger brothers are full of surprises, aren’t they, Dean?”

“You’re lying. You’re the Father of fucking Lies.”

“I’m sorry you lost your favorite hammer, Dean, but there really was nothing left.”

“He wasn’t...he’s not a hammer.”

Lucifer sighed. “Fine, your favorite gun, then. But the chamber was empty and the barrel was bent. What good was it to you?”

“That’s _not the point_.”

Lucifer straightened his coat, looking down at Dean from what seemed like a great height, even though Dean still had an inch on him in this vessel. “No, the point was that he loved you, and that meant he let you use him past the limit of all reason. He bled himself dry and thanked you for the opportunity.”

“I...you have no idea. You don’t know.”

“I _do_ know, Dean. I know better than anyone what he felt.”

“Maybe.” Dean spoke through the haze of bitter smoke that seemed to be filling his lungs, his nose, his throat. He was burning alive. “But you don’t know what I felt. Feel.”

“I don’t care what you feel.” Lucifer advanced on him, predatory and alien, but Dean couldn’t find it in himself to be afraid any more. “If you were our Father—if you were _another angel_ , even, I could find something to admire in him and respect in you for that. But this? This was an abomination and I’m glad, for my brother’s sake, that it’s over.” His eyes glinted, hard in the green autumnal meadow as he returned his attention to Amara. “Now, let’s finish the job. And then you and me and Sam can continue our discussion, Old Testament-style. I think it’s time your reign of terror came to an end.”

“About that,” Sam’s voice said, from behind the tree. “Maybe rethink your plan.”

“What? How are you even here?”

Suddenly Rowena materialized next to them. Her neck, which Sam said had been snapped, appeared smooth and graceful, unblemished. “Hello, handsome.” Her smile was terrifying in its sweetness. Before Lucifer could react, she hurled a hex bag at him, covering him in red-purple powder that sent him toppling like a tower. As he lurched towards her, she grabbed him by the tie—that damned striped tie that Dean kept meaning to replace—and hauled him over to where Amara now lay. “It’s not that I’m _angry_ with you, angel,” Rowena said, pulling him in close. “Just disappointed.”

Rowena spoke some words—old words, heavy with myrrh and blood and long-dormant magic. She reached into Lucifer, through the hole in his shirt, and Dean saw his eyes roll back while Rowena’s glowed white. Around her the grass caught fire. She knelt, and with her other hand she reached into Amara, like nothing, like a bright spear through dark water. For a moment they were suspended in lopsided cruciform. The sky screamed. Dean fell to his knees and wondered if it was possible to die when you were already dead.

****  
When he woke, Dean was in the Impala, with his head pressed against the steering wheel and his neck at an uncomfortable angle. It took him a moment to recognize the rasping breath in his right ear as Sam’s, and he sat up too quickly. Sam was slumped windowwards, his hands upturned on his soot-black lap. There seemed to be a lot of blood along the bottom of his shirt, but it had dried, and his color was good. Dean relaxed a fraction and allowed his focus to widen. The truck stop was levelled, a site of devastation to rival Sodom and/or Gomorrah. The pavement was still on fire in places, and for a mile in all directions, the trees had been blown outward, as though from a great blast. There was no sign of Rowena, no sign of Amara, and no sign of either Lucifer or Cas.

 _Cas_.

Dean fumbled with the door handle and found that his hands weren’t working as they should be. His face was wet, which probably meant crying, and who the hell cared, really. He sat upright, taking a shuddering breath with lungs that felt two sizes too small, and tipped his head back. As he did so, his eyes caught the sideview mirror, and in its surface, a familiar profile: the dark crescents of eyelashes, disheveled hair, the rumpled line of a truly awful coat, a tie like a fallen banner. His heart heaved, a seasick spasm in his chest. Who would it be when those eyelashes swept upward? ( _If_ wasn’t the question, _if_ was never the question.) Of course. The car was warded. Whoever it was couldn’t get in.

He tried the door again, laid his hand on the angel blade in his pocket and hated himself a little for it. The door opened with a groan, but the figure on the ground didn’t stir. Cautiously, Dean knelt down, each nerve jumping its own scared bolero, ready to send him in a hundred directions at once. Tentatively he reached out, fingertips barely brushing the lapels of the blood-stained coat.

“Hey, Cas,” Dean said, and the banal phrase was rendered absurd. He could almost laugh. “Cas. That you? Come on, man. You in there?”

Dean leaned forward a little more, brought his hand to the side of hopefully-Cas’ face and was relieved to find it warm to the touch. But he didn’t let go of the blade hilt, either.

It was hard for Dean to say how long he stayed like that, but his knees had begun to complain, and he had started contemplating standing, when the body under his hands seemed to jump to life, like it had been shocked back into existence. Dean nearly lost his balance, planting a palm on the center of Cas’ chest and withdrawing his other hand in attempt to stabilize himself. It _had_ to be Cas. The look of slow confusion as his eyes darted to all corners cleared away the instant he lighted on Dean’s face. And there was that darkly burning spark of recognition, the one that could find Dean anywhere, alive or dead, or in between.

Those same eyes shifted a second later to take in the gleam of the blade that Dean held, his half-crouch, the weight of his other palm. And then they closed.

“Shit.” The angel blade fell with a clatter. Dean followed it with a sob, right across Cas’ chest, in the smoking rubble of a forgotten truck stop in Illinois, the site of humanity’s third last stand. He let himself sink down, and god, it was disgusting and he didn’t even care; he wrapped his arm around Cas’ shoulder, and slid the other behind his neck. “Hey,” Dean said, pressing his ear against the ocean swell of Cas’ heartbeat, letting it crash around him. “Hey. Come on.”

In the distance, he heard Sam’s door open and then softly close, but there was no sound of approaching footsteps.

“Don’t you disappear on me,” Dean whispered. “Don’t.” He pulled Cas’ hand up to his own and laced their fingers together, but there was no sign of any response.

“Hey,” Dean tried again after a while, ignoring the sharp bite of gravel as it dug into his leg, his shoulder. “I owe you a beer. With interest.”

He heard Sam moving quietly in the background, methodically breaking the sigils that kept Cas out of the car.

To hell with it. Dean leaned in close, close enough to press his nose to Cas’ temple, and he did. He had one last offering. As inadequate as it was, it was the only one he could make. “You’re not a hammer. Never have been. Let me prove it to you.”

Cas squeezed his hand.

 

Now it was time to learn to walk upright. Human beings. Or something like them.

 

**Author's Note:**

> The black ibis forms the basis of the hieroglyphs for 'weakness', 'mourning' and 'destroyed'. The flamingo is the basis for 'wrath', and the cormorant for 'entry', 'intimacy', and 'friends'.
> 
> Sorry about the sexualized violence, but I feel like the show would probably take that route, because...yeah. Hopefully I've written it as a tactical move on Castiel's part rather than anything _actually_ sexual.


End file.
